1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electrical interface device for a degaussing system junction box.
2. Description of the Background Art
Lightweight conductors that can transmit large amounts of electric current without significant loss have numerous applications. For example, in electro-refining applications such as aluminum production processes, high amounts of current are required. Other applications requiring light-weight, high-current conductors are naval ships. Naval ships, typically formed of ferromagnetic materials and thus having a substantive magnetic field, are outfitted with complex degaussing systems which serve to reduce the magnetic field of the ship. This permits the naval ships to evade magnetic sensitive ordnances or devices such as mines that are triggered by the ship's large magnetic field.
In a degaussing system, a system of electromagnetic windings (“degaussing coils”) are provided within the ships hull. For example, multi-turn wire windings are installed to surround the ship hull in each of three orthogonal directions. By controlling the electric current flowing through the degaussing coils, the magnetic field generated by the ship's hull can be controlled and even “canceled”. This, in turn, reduces the possibility of detection of the ship by magnetic sensitive ordnance or devices.
To accommodate the high-current requirements in the exemplary applications described above, conventional wire cables, including degaussing coils, are formed of large diameter conductive wires, typically made of copper or aluminum wire. However, this leads to undesirably heavy, bulky, and inflexible cables.
Recently, it has been proposed to replace the large diameter conventional cables with conductors formed of high-temperature superconducting (HTS) materials. As used herein, a high temperature superconductor (HTS) material refers to a material that can maintain superconducting behavior at temperatures of 20 K and higher (i.e., critical temperature, Tc≧20 K). HTS wire bundles are disclosed in co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/880,567, the contents of which are incorporated by reference herein. Accordingly, the HTS wire bundles afford greater flexibility, reduced weight, and high current carrying capacity, thereby having significant advantages over the conventional cables.
For both conventional cables and HTS wire bundles, in order to obtain a large wire winding using one or more multi-conductor cables/bundles, individual conductors within the multi-conductor cables or bundles must be serially joined. That is, an electromagnetic winding is formed from a multi-conductor cable or bundle by joining a first end of one conductor to the second end of another conductor, for each conductor until a single, multi-turn winding is obtained. For both conventional cables and HTS wire bundles, this is accomplished by manually soldering each connection, a process that is time consuming and highly labor intensive. Such soldering is prone to errors, including bad solder joints and improper connections, due to the difficulties associated with performing this work within the hull of a ship. Moreover, such errors are difficult to locate and repair.